Daily bread

I am not the bread maker in this house. I have tried and, repeatedly, failed. Yeast scares me, the bread refuses to rise. Even my soda bread left me with nothing to eat sandwiches on, my only choice to recycle it as breadcrumbs.

Stephen makes fantastic bread. He makes his potato bread every week for his sandwiches at work. I’m a little jealous really. Or a lot jealous.

We bought a new mixer last week to make the bread making easier (expect a review from Stephen shortly, he wants to test all the features first!) so I had a now or never moment. Now I guess. Armed with my new mixer and my expert bread maker boyfriend I set out to make some of these things for the bean burgers coming in my next Riverford box.

These things? I suppose on a burger they are more usually called a bun. My boyfriend and the recipe call them rolls. My three years in Huddersfield heard them called Barm Cakes. I call them muffins. That’s what you get in Heywood. You go to the shop to buy a pack of muffins, bring them home and eat a fried tofu muffin, go out later and get a chip muffin. Probably the usage comes from the Lancashire Oven-bottom Muffin but we use it for everything. And to prove how localised it is I went to university with a girl from the other side of Bury (the next town over, barely separated from Heywood by a motorway) who though calling them muffins was the strangest thing she had ever heard.

Well there you go, that’s living in Heywood for you. So I made my muffins. Crunchy on the outside, a little too soggy on the inside, and now cooling off in the freezer. And the yeast did rise!